Entropy’s eternal diktat that the more complex a structure, the more work must be done to build and maintain it applies as much to our societies as it does to our bodies. It takes work to transform clay into bricks and bricks into buildings in the same way it takes energy to transform fields of grain into loaves of bread. Accordingly, the complexity of any particular society at any particular time is often a useful measure for the quantities of energy that they capture, and also the amount of work (in the raw, physical sense of the word) that is needed to build and then maintain this
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